In honor of her selection as this year’s Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering by the Franklin Institute, the Center for Advanced Communications (CAC) saluted Dr. Ingrid Daubechies, Professor of Applied and Computational Mathematics at Duke University, with a workshop on her signature area of expertise – theory and application of wavelets. The event, co-sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, was held during Franklin Institute Awards Week on April 28.

“We were very pleased to honor Dr. Daubechies, whose work is at the foundation of modern signal analyses which are the core of our research at the CAC,” says Dr. Moeness Amin, Director. The CAC is home to world-renowned facilities for advancing research into antennas, wireless communications, radar and through-the-wall imaging, radio frequency identification, acoustics, and ultrasound.

More than 100 engineers from academia and industry attended the workshop, which featured keynote speakers from Washington, Stanford, and Duke Universities, as well as Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France, who presented research on wavelets in emerging areas, such as image compression, sparsification, and compressive sensing. Dr. Daubechies presented “Wavelets: A Historical Perspective” to cap the day’s discussions. The group also toured the CAC’s research laboratories.

The Franklin Institute Awards have been given annually for more than 185 years, honoring leading scientists and engineers, some of whom also later become Nobel Laureates. According to the Franklin Institute, Dr. Daubechies was selected as a 2011 honoree "for her for fundamental discoveries in the field of compact representations of data, leading to efficient image compression as used in digital photography.” Dr. Daubechies is credited with discovering the construction of compacted wavelet forms and using them to create new applications that have improved medical imaging remote sensing and surveillance, printing and scanning, the Internet, and of course, digital photography.

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